Is America at peace or at war? The Bush administration seems to want it both ways.
Vice President Dick Cheney spent last week warning that the United States faced a mortal threat from Iraq and strongly suggesting the nation would soon have to mount a full-scale war to depose Saddam Hussein. That followed months of President Bush asserting--correctly--that America is already in a state of war against international terrorism.
But, as the New Republic recently reported, Mitch Daniels, the administration's shrewd budget director, took a very different tack on PBS' Charlie Rose show the other day. Defending the $1.35-trillion tax cut Bush pushed through Congress last year, Daniels argued that, "Americans are being taxed at the highest peacetime rates in history."
So which is it, wartime or peacetime? Daily life may still feel like peacetime. But the federal budget is definitely moving toward a wartime footing. After Sept. 11, Bush proposed and Congress approved a rapid increase in defense spending; by the middle of this decade, Bush wants to spend over $100 billion a year more on the Pentagon than President Clinton proposed in his final budget.
A war in Iraq would add to those costs. The last war against Hussein cost about $60 billion. Lawrence J. Korb, an assistant secretary of Defense for manpower under President Reagan, says a second Gulf War wouldn't cost as much initially because it would probably require fewer troops.
But an unexpectedly long war would increase the financial (not to mention, human) cost. And, Korb notes, the cost of reconstructing a post-Saddam Iraq would add to the final bill--to the point where he believes a second war in the Gulf would ultimately cost as much as the first.
Then there is the cost of hardening American defenses against terrorism. This year, Bush is seeking $38 billion in federal spending for homeland security, about double the amount two years ago. Thumbing through the national strategy for homeland security the White House published this summer, it's clear the administration envisions those numbers rising further.
The plan is filled with big-ticket ambitions: developing "smart borders," "recapitalizing" the Coast Guard, inventing a new generation of vaccines and massively increasing federal support for local emergency agencies. None of that will be cheap.
